the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

i remember in the 80s having quite an unsettling conversation on the phone -- for a piece I was researching for Dylan Jones lol -- with a young woman from PETA in America, quizzing her about the argument that animals should of course be sacred but that people e.g. with spectacles, bcz unfit, should be herded to the Darwinian die-off, .

I said "but that includes me" and she said "so be it" (to be fair this was the correct response rhetorically to my manipulative gambit). Unsure if this was actual PETA doctrine at the time or since but the distinction being made was p stark. And is in some sense or other quite widespread.

peta are equal parts stupid and stupid, there are a lot of far better animal advocate groups out there that don't just do hateful shit for stunts

EU official on DD's suggestion that whole of UK will align with EU regs. "The UK will not have any say on the decisions taken in Brussels and will basically implement them without having any influence over them... it makes the UK kind of a regulatory 'protectorate" of Brussels'".

— Daniel Boffey (@DanielBoffey) December 5, 2017

DD taking back contrololol

BANTZustan

no i mean the tendency -- which LG's post and yr affirmation of same dpn't really sidestep -- to pass the responsibility for significant change for the good onto a process that doesn't appear to have an agent (the "grown-ups" being the right-thinking people who will somehow to cause this to come about without it having to pass upwards through the extant political thingumajic you want to transform)

i don't have to be able to implement the solution to suggest it, or to have an idea how it could come about. i'm just posting about the situation, i'm not putting myself in a position where i am the one to set the wheels in motion to solve it.

if we discounted all political views that pass responsibility for change onto a process that doesn't appear to have an agent we wouldn't be left with very many views imo.

we're both from a country that used an electoral system of beauty, nuance and power to elect the same shower of corrupt bastards in over and over for ever.

sort of true but every party bar sinn fein has been in power in my lifetime, and several independents have had sway as well for better or worse.

you could argue that "stops things getting done" or you could say it tempers the worst excesses of the bastards.

not sure there's an argument against brexit that doesn't involve some level of condescension towards vast swathes of the electorate. what can you do when people vote for something which will fuck them over?

it's certainly not an endorsement of the current democratic system and it's arguably less patronising to suggest a new system of democracy than it is to suggest going out to people and teaching them why they should value the lives of people whose skin colour is different or whatever.

tbf i wasn't saying that, i was saying that Remain needs to make more of a case for the awesomeness of the EU than they bothered doing during the referendum campaign

cos "hey guys, everything's great, you want this to carry on forever, right?" didn't really cut it

“what can you do when people vote for something which will fuck them over?”

Don’t put forth policy proposals that will fuck people over?

right, but we're past that point.

fair enough LG -- i'm not exactly out manning picket lines myself here -- but i think it's a baked-in weakness of arguments for (and via) electoral reform, that they always seems to elide agency or (which is the same thing) trust in some slightly magical top-down institution to take charge of the process, which (to me)* makes ER quite a bad element to focus on or to foreground

*confessing: it's a bugbear, not least bcz step two is always a unresolvable stand-up drag-out fight between minutely distinct kinds of AV or STV or whatever, that causes the rest of the world's eyes to roll as they glaze over

i'd guess most brexiteers don't believe they will be fucked over, especially the people who are already fucked over. scratch that, those peeps don't really vote. it's the tier above them that are kinda paranoid about going back to being fucked over or have learned to believe that the only reason they're not fucked over is because of their own rugged individualism.

yeah i mean it is essentially saying "some powerful people" need to reshape democracy. but a lot of discussions in recent months have had this element to them - eg the idea that brexit should never have gone to a public vote.

we sort of rely on a fair democratic system to shape its own rules or reform them, maybe that doesn't work or ever happen. maybe that's what we're seeing in america, uk etc, the idea that only a few people actually know the inner workings of these systems and they are all establishment politicians or academics - the rest might want to change the system but have no idea what that means, and are never offered the chance to do so apart from these roundabout tassels that bob above their head every now and again, not intended for that purpose but ripped down as a way of changing something.

xpost

i mean fundamentally -- and this is the root of my politics i suppose -- i think meaningful transformation of the "system" for the better is just no longer going to be top-down tinkering with the machinery: for a variety of reasons, we've moved out beyond the end of the technocratic era (which began with bismarck-gladstone and ended maybe with blair-obama) -- which is also why the "mass education project" is a non-starter, yes, practically or politically

(something like this *did* exist back in the age of empire, bcz it was consonant with the structures and flows of empire -- but the structures and flows are really really different now, in whatever the current era is)

anyway, beyond saying "it must come from below to be meaningful" and "and actually it WILL come from below whether we accept it or not" and then flourishing my red flag dramatically, i don't really have much idea what "it" is actually going to be (except that it could be quite a bad "it" if nice ppl don't involve themselves)

have learned to believe that the only reason they're not fucked over is because of their own rugged individualism

see i think this is a commonly stated belief, that is deep down not believed at all: its most aggressive defenders have often simultaneously internalised serious but unspeakable self-blaming assumptions about their own uselessness

i derive this insight from watching the apprentice feat.sir a.sugar obv

baron sugar i mean

well you know i don't really count those dorks as fully human

"i got where i am today thru the sweat of my own brow" is a pretty common working class trope as well as lol entrepreneurs

which brings us back to Baron Harkonnen i guess

Remain needs to make more of a case for the awesomeness of the EU than they bothered doing during the referendum campaign

I don't buy this really. It suggests there actually WAS a better way for the status quo to have been sold (or resold) to various sceptics and, pessimistically or cynically, I don't think in practice that was feasible (without getting into more general issues like how the Tories like to govern).

prob like 9 out of 10 people think this way, either fully or to an extent.

xpost to nv

yeah that doesn't feel like an overestimate, even if you're trust fund scum you probly like to kid yourself that you're worth it

as a trope, i think it's very often a psychic defence against deep unstated belief in one's own weakness and (same thing ) unworthiness -- hence the outfacing rage that cocoons it

no one is fully human: those dorks are collective manifestations of the most problematic of all the symptoms we share

👉🏽 i'm fired

i dunno if people can function without some sense of "i am who i am because of choices i make"

and to some extent it must be true for everyone, tho not maybe in the ways they think.

"i could be who i could be because of choices i must now make" is the lifeline

what are examples of bottom up change in british political history and why couldn't it happen wrt electoral reform?

Civil war; repeal of the corn laws; agitation in the colonies against being colonies. Electoral reform followed from all of them, but the form it took was not predetermined or even the primary motor of the change.

I mean. maybe a mass movement could be formulated round electoral reform (like the suffragettes): but you'd need a structural change first, for it to be meaningful; for it to "take" (suffragettes achieved their goals as a consequence of the social changes wrought by WW1).

It's very possible that Brexit brings just that major upheaval (so far ofc it hasn't actually happened) that could mean the occurrence of structural changes.

Can't see anything like 2nd ref, not least bcz Europe has huge problems the likes of Juncker don't care and are perhaps unable to solve.

How best can the destruction of the Tory Party be engineered from this?

Chronos

the structural changes are happening anyway, it's just that they're not yet really willed or controlled in any sense (and it isn't yet clear what form the public willing or controlling of the changes might take): party politics is it currently manifests IS non-representative, as ogmor said upthread, and CAN no longer deliver good agents

what isn't clear is even what kinds of things these "good agents" are going to be :| i'm entirely unconvinced that better representation is merely a matter of redrawing how votes are tallied to deliver parliamentary power -- i guess i imagine that the right kind of agitation will shape the new agencies, and modes of representation will (of necessity) adapt to this shaping

BUT i'm describing this at a ridiculously high level of abstraction (bcz unclear etc)

at a mythological level, the tory party is the ur-party in the "modern" settlement: the oldest extant political organisation still functioning that has existed primarily within a democratic set-up

(obviously some royal families are older but they belong to an earlier set-up)

so its ending will only come with the overthrow of etc etc /mythological speculation

xxxp the Tories seem to be doing a p good job self-destructing all by themselves at the moment, though like the COCKROACH POLITICIANS OF COCKROACH BRITAIN that they are they'll find a way to pull it out of the bag

chartism seems like an interesting example of bottom-up politics, especially to inject some realism about the timescale & difficulties, but there aren't any comparably clear or popular goals wrt electoral reform atm

I think I'm going back to despair and not thinking about it

Been watching what has been going at Haringey. There are specific circumstances at play but the *cough* displacement of councillors has been a huge positive. The social movement (s) that are growing are an encouraging sign and hopefully will form more than a check on parliament, leading to a bottom up re-config. V early days on all this.

What's going on in Haringey is of course a good thing - it will give other councillors (especially in effective one-party boroughs) pause for thought before trying anything similar again.

I'm pretty sceptical of the idea that 'bottom up' social movements are always going to deliver cuddly socialists but we're not anywhere near that flashpoint just yet.

yes i think "bottom up" is also a bit a misleading shorthand (not least bcz it more or less belongs to the pre-existing structures) -- which is why i was going to ridiculous (=incomprehensible) lengths to not say it in those actual terms lol

Hopefully it won't be so cuddly lol but I do wonder what the re-config via mass social movements could deliver (the education discussion above)

nice little collection of BJ, Kate Hoey + other brexit campaigners summarily dismissing pertinent questions on the current Irish Border problem during the referendum campaign last year. Yeah they talked mountains of garbage - we know, but it is pleasing to hear them ridiculed from the current fucked up vantage.

On Mair's PM show I should add.

I'm pretty sceptical of the idea that 'bottom up' social movements are always going to deliver cuddly socialists

Isn't the question more whether they could ever deliver that? I don't know anyone who think it's a certainity.

not sure there's an argument against brexit that doesn't involve some level of condescension towards vast swathes of the electorate.

Pick an issue, any issue imo and this is likely to be true

Also on our own electoral system, it allows for fairly rapid change and pretty stable vanilla government with whatever said you like flavouring it.

Also FG are only ever let in to clean up but as an electorate we consider them nothing more than a necessary evil on that score

lol IDS

“You know this Irish stuff was not at this state some months ago, now it’s suddenly become an issue because the Irish - for political reasons internally, presidential elections, disputes between two elements of the same party - they suddenly laid this on.

Are they so stupid
Are they pretending to be so stupid
Do they think there are enough voters so stupid

are you asking that of the Tories?

Yes they are, No they aren't pretending, There are enough voters that stupid.

I was, to be clear, sure of number three

given that the financial situation is pretty ropey, I guess it's partly getting their story straight for if Labour do come to power? "it was a long painful process, but we fixed the economy, then Labour ruined it again"?

Bit difficult to do that when there's no food on the shelves because the lorries are stuck at Calais.

How can I spot the difference between austerity and standard Tory economic policy?

It's like Nelson Muntz telling you you've stopped hitting yourself.

would that our government have the humanity and compassion of a nelson muntz

S Bush:" a weird hybrid of Ed Miliband and the Daily Mail’s comment section." so in other words austerity isn't over!

truecolors.mp3

Cayman Islands has stand at UK Conservative Party Conference #Conservatives2018 @caymangovt @BritishOverseas pic.twitter.com/VfJJGmSlPX

— crown dependency pol (@CROWNDPN) October 1, 2018

I'd missed this lol

“We will fight hope with hate,” bellows the Home Sec, before correcting himself

— steve hawkes (@steve_hawkes) October 2, 2018

The booklets, handed out at a conference fringe meeting, reference "the Great Replacement" and the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory "cultural Marxism".

luckily for them, nobody gaf about good old-fashioned Conservative anti-Semitism.

the subtlest goatse

hats off for planting "maybe tomorrow I'll wanna settle down..." in my head

worst reboot idea ever

The list of illustrations on the Cultural Marxism leaflet gives a sense of the fresh and enlightening right wing thought contained herein:

Diagram 1 : Horseshoe
Diagram 2 : Virtue-Signalling Cycle

diagram 3: the typical skull shape of the degenerate slav

Whoever said fascists hate dancing and fun are wrong.

You may or may not need this in your lives:

https://mobile.twitter.com/dancingtheresaM

have another:

I spent too much time on this. #TheresaMay pic.twitter.com/4aODFe0VLU

— Luke (@Mr_LukeBenson) October 3, 2018

Can we start a new thread? This is getting a pain to load on my crappy phone/internet connection/whatever. And our transatlantic friends get a new one every month. NOT FAIR!

'lol we're all gonna die: a pre-brexit uk politics panic thread'

(i agree btw, this thread is hueg)

i don't think we should take any cues from the US politics thread

not that i'm saying this one might be due for a new chapter

'Further adventures of the dancing queen: Onward to Brexit and other mishaps'.

I'm so angrily unbalanced rn I couldn't think of anything without using unpleasant murderous terms!

The BBC's political social media team tweeted 22 breezily upbeat times on the May speech yesterday to the single ho-hum its Corbyn talking again Kuenssberg tweet, last week. The end of austerity comes with a freeze on fuel duty and Local Authorities still not having the funding to meet their legal obligations to protect disabled/vulnerable people/children etc. Anyone talking up this End of Austerity as an actual thing needs shooting down immediately. If anything we are going into Peak Austerity and the the national rollout of UC next year is going be a real treat for aficionados of tinned foodbank goods!

as Dawn Foster pointed out, Gideon has already declared austerity was over in 2015.

I have no idea where you're getting those figures from, man - there's at least nine tweets on the BBC politics twitter with Corbyn's speech. And I'd expect there to be more coverage of May's - she's the one actually in charge, and as you say what she says kills people.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dol1rB5XsAAEH0c.jpg

from this on twitter, didn't check its veracity tbh!

*bangs clipboard*
NEW THREAD NEW THEAD NEW THREAD

That's your job.

new thread new thread new thread (bangs clipboard)

― mark s, Monday, July 9, 2018 3:20 PM (two months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^ >:(

i'm on strike

one out all out: a brexit from the modern world and every one of its problems please (we're all gonna die lol)

(someone else has to do the locking tho)